10/100 network woes
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I wouldn't replace anything without doing more checking. Nothing specifically says this is a network issue to me. There's a bottleneck somewhere that has shown itself since more users have been added but that is not necessarily a network issue.
I agree, could easily not be network related, or not directly.
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@thanksajdotcom said:
Assuming you have auto-negotiation on, they will still run at FastEthernet speed. However, they handle the volume of traffic better.
Huh? Explain that one.
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@thanksajdotcom said:
Assuming you have auto-negotiation on, they will still run at FastEthernet speed.
Autonegotiate is a requirement of the GigE spec. Cisco doesn't honour this, but that is part of Cisco not being standards compliant.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@technobabble distance from the switch doesn't matter, until you start dropping packets from being too far away.
FTFY
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I'd look at the topology, see if a new bottleneck is in between the QB server and one or more of the devices attaching to it. Check for broadcast storms. Check for odd traffic from any of the new devices. Try unplugging the new stuff and see if things magically improve.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@technobabble distance from the switch doesn't matter, until you start dropping packets from being too far away.
FTFY
Well yeah..
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
Assuming you have auto-negotiation on, they will still run at FastEthernet speed. However, they handle the volume of traffic better.
Huh? Explain that one.
When you have a full GigE switch, even if the connection speed auto-negotiates down to 10/100, the switches handle the traffic better. I don't know all the exact technical reasons behind it, but it's kind of like how a Ferrari and my Optima both might only be doing 75 on the highway, but the Ferrari is under a lot less strain to do 75 than my Optima. Does that make sense?
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@thanksajdotcom said:
When you have a full GigE switch, even if the connection speed auto-negotiates down to 10/100, the switches handle the traffic better.
No it doesn't. The one and only thing that makes a switch a GigE switch or a FastEthernet switch is the speed of the ports, nothing else. They can literally be the same device otherwise.
Commonly GigE switches have faster backplanes, but nothing makes this a requirement or a hard fact. It's just that faster backplanes are needed to handle the additional traffic that GigE can theoretically take. But until you have saturated a switch, the speed of the backplane is irrelevant. Latency is a factor, but a tiny one outside of iSCSI scenarios, and is a separate concern from this. FastEthernet switches might actually handle things better, depending on a number of factors.
Don't "read into" GigE. There is no magic. It's just a faster port speed, nothing else.
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@thanksajdotcom said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
Assuming you have auto-negotiation on, they will still run at FastEthernet speed. However, they handle the volume of traffic better.
Huh? Explain that one.
When you have a full GigE switch, even if the connection speed auto-negotiates down to 10/100, the switches handle the traffic better. I don't know all the exact technical reasons behind it, but it's kind of like how a Ferrari and my Optima both might only be doing 75 on the highway, but the Ferrari is under a lot less strain to do 75 than my Optima. Does that make sense?
That has nothing to do with gig speeds. that's just having a better switch that has more throughput and switching speed. You could get really high switching speeds on 15yr old 100mb Catalysts switches. In fact I have one running CatOS at home (not in use) that could beat many low end gig switches in switching speeds. That's just buying a higher end switch.
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@thanksajdotcom said:
I don't know all the exact technical reasons behind it, but it's kind of like how a Ferrari and my Optima both might only be doing 75 on the highway, but the Ferrari is under a lot less strain to do 75 than my Optima. Does that make sense?
I can see what you are thinking, but it is a bad analogy. There is no stress here, it's not like an engine.
Think of it more about hauling fruitcakes. Your Optima and a Ford F150 can both haul fruitcake at 75mph. The Ford F150 can haul more for sure, but if you never haul more than twenty fruitcakes at a time, the F150 has no advantage. Neither is stressed or not. One could haul more, if you had more to haul. But until you need more capacity than the Optima, having extra capacity is just a waste.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
I don't know all the exact technical reasons behind it, but it's kind of like how a Ferrari and my Optima both might only be doing 75 on the highway, but the Ferrari is under a lot less strain to do 75 than my Optima. Does that make sense?
I can see what you are thinking, but it is a bad analogy. There is no stress here, it's not like an engine.
Think of it more about hauling fruitcakes. Your Optima and a Ford F150 can both haul fruitcake at 75mph. The Ford F150 can haul more for sure, but if you never haul more than twenty fruitcakes at a time, the F150 has no advantage. Neither is stressed or not. One could haul more, if you had more to haul. But until you need more capacity than the Optima, having extra capacity is just a waste.
And it's using more gas to get the same job done.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksajdotcom said:
I don't know all the exact technical reasons behind it, but it's kind of like how a Ferrari and my Optima both might only be doing 75 on the highway, but the Ferrari is under a lot less strain to do 75 than my Optima. Does that make sense?
I can see what you are thinking, but it is a bad analogy. There is no stress here, it's not like an engine.
Think of it more about hauling fruitcakes. Your Optima and a Ford F150 can both haul fruitcake at 75mph. The Ford F150 can haul more for sure, but if you never haul more than twenty fruitcakes at a time, the F150 has no advantage. Neither is stressed or not. One could haul more, if you had more to haul. But until you need more capacity than the Optima, having extra capacity is just a waste.
And it's using more gas to get the same job done.
Yeah, didn't want to go there as the GigE switches are unlikely to actually draw more power
But maybe. -
@thecreativeone91 still only 2 people using QB...and only occasionally daily.
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Also it's not a server, it's the bosses PC with QB on it with a simple file share for the office assistant to use.
I was on the PCs the other day and I didn't notice any network issues, and since NOTHING is networked but a QB file from a PC, I am not sure there is anything wrong. I will wait for the office assistant to return to see what she says, since she is the main QB worker via the shared folder.
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Sympathy pain upvote for 10/100 and the switching chain of death and sadness.
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@MattSpeller said:
Sympathy pain upvote for 10/100 and the switching chain of death and sadness.
That's where FastEthernet will get you. The one uplink port is a 100Mb/s bottleneck of unhappiness. GigE is generally overkill to the desktop. You'll never see a desktop pulling more than 300Mb/s and very rarely even 100Mb's. But any shared port has that extra overhead to use. In FastEthernet, each port is likely a bit of a bottleneck and when anything attempts to share a port you feel the bottleneck very strongly.
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@technobabble said:
Also it's not a server, it's the bosses PC with QB on it with a simple file share for the office assistant to use.
I was on the PCs the other day and I didn't notice any network issues, and since NOTHING is networked but a QB file from a PC, I am not sure there is anything wrong. I will wait for the office assistant to return to see what she says, since she is the main QB worker via the shared folder.
Is this data going between the two switches? Also what are the switches? and do they have 1 gig uplinks?
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@scottalanmiller yup, the switching chain is where the upgrade to gig will let you get away with murder compared to 10/100. We have to run port agg and dropped lots of cash to run dual cables between each of the floors to keep the layout as flat as possible. Blatant case of flushing good money after bad but no other option.
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QB is very sensative to latency. really the program is meant to be run locally. It's just a workaround for people who don't want to spend the money (or switch to open source) for a type of [transnational] program that would be better served by a database system than a file system.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
QB is very sensative to latency. really the program is meant to be run locally. It's just a workaround for people who don't want to spend the money (or switch to open source) for a type of [transnational] program that would be better served by a database system than a file system.
What is mind-boggling is that there are awesome, hosted, free options like Wave that kick the absolute crap out of QB. Yet these small businesses continue to make massive donations to Intuit, make their own lives hell and spend a fortune on IT people who can only make vane attempts to get QB to limp along. Why would any person with an interest in the finances or the success of a business even allow Intuit to be a consideration?
